Tribulation Page 3

  Poor Ethan took off his bush hat and held it like a support animal. “Different climates, mate.” He sounded more baffled than irritated but was definitely both.

  Ronin backed up Walter as he waved his half-eaten sandwich roll, saying, “China’s got the same issue, but they spread out. Even Cairns has a Chinatown, right?”

  Taiyo hoped Ronin was doing some kind of bit, feeding off Walter.

  “Bloody hell, mate. We’re talking species, not ethnicities.”

  Taiyo picked up the jar of poison he’d haphazardly consumed and examined the label. Vegemite. He unscrewed the lid for a sniff. It burned his sinus cavity like a lab accident, but, aware the evaluators might see a picky eater as high maintenance, he forced the rest of the roll down his throat, repercussions to his gastrointestinal tract be damned. Chewing fast, he distracted himself by counting backward from a hundred by thirteens, as the JAXA evaluators had made him do in round two. For JAXA, though, he’d done it in a gyrating three-axis harness while inputting unrelated data into a spreadsheet.

  “Heaps of things in the rainforest look edible but can land your arse in hospital.” Taiyo tried to hide his misery, but Ethan paused to ask if he was okay. “Ya look like you’ve swallowed a spiny anteater.”

  Taiyo wiped his eyes on his sleeve and wheezed out a reply: “Just fine.”

  “Righty, then,” said Ethan before heading for the stairs. “Take five. I’ll be back with presents and assignments.”

  3

  After ten minutes passed and Ethan still hadn’t returned, Taiyo leaned back in the patio chair, slipped in an earbud, and resumed his podcast:

  Dr. Shieling: This week’s top story’s got to be that big kaboom over western Africa, hey, JC?

  Cardoza: You’re so eloquent.

  Dr. Shieling: Swakopmund. How’s that for eloquent? Twenty miles above the Namib Desert, near the town of Swakopmund. That’s where the thing exploded.

  Cardoza: An air burst.

  Dr. Shieling: Tell us, JC.

  Cardoza: Everyone’s seen the dashcam clips. A fireball across the midday sky. Thirty meters across—a hundred feet. Ten tons going Kaboom! a mile above the ground.

  Dr. Shieling: Vaporized.

  Cardoza: My favorite part was the shock wave. Did you see it blow the roof clean off that school? Broke a bunch of windows, too. Lots of fun. Nobody got hurt.

  Dr. Shieling: It killed a sheep.

  Cardoza: Allegedly. … But in all seriousness, this is the third meteor event in under a year. People are getting antsy. What’s going on, doc?

  Dr. Shieling: People get antsy about a lot of things.

  Cardoza: But imagine it hadn’t done the air-burst thing. It would’ve torn Earth a new one. You’ve seen that big hole down in Arizona, right?

  Dr. Shieling: Don’t dis Phoenix, man. We’ve got listeners there.

  Cardoza: Har-har.

  Dr. Shieling: Okay, no points. That was too easy.

  Cardoza: Last winter, that one over Mongolia, then Iran, and now Namibia. Aren’t you pissing yourself yet?

  Dr. Shieling: It isn’t that unusual.

  Cardoza: Tell it to the masses, man. We’ve got listeners losing their shit over this. Tell them to calm down. Those are your people. They’ll listen to you.

  Dr. Shieling: For you, Jesus, anything. … People of Earth. Listen up. Earthlings. Fellow humans … chill the fuck out!

  Cardoza: Care to elaborate, Doctor?

  Dr. Shieling: Of course people think there’s a link with Tabaldak.

  Cardoza: Isn’t there?

  Dr. Shieling: It seems intuitive that the sudden appearance of something as big as Tabaldak would throw the gravitational balance of the solar system out of whack. But we have to keep a couple things in mind. One, having kids also seems intuitive, but clearly there’s no faster way to obliterate the joy in your life. Sex, meditation, base jumping, heroine, silence—all very difficult to enjoy with children.

  Cardoza: A little off topic.

  Dr. Shieling: The point is, these kinds of events—impacts or air bursts, not children—do happen time to time. Maybe every five or ten years. They aren’t that rare.

  Cardoza: Third one in a year, though, man.

  Dr. Shieling: Right. But twice a decade is average, and three data points aren’t enough to tell us what’s anomalous and what’s not. And, keep in mind that we live in a time when we’ve never had so many eyes and instruments pointed at the sky. If this happens twenty years ago, no herder on the edge of the Namib Desert is whipping out a smartphone to record his sheep getting atomized.

  Cardoza: Uh huh. But …

  Dr. Shieling: But nothing, JC. Some pretty basic math not only tells us that it did not come from Tabaldak but that it could not come from Tabaldak.

  Cardoza: You got top people running numbers, I guess.

  Dr. Shieling: The best. And they see just how little Tabaldak’s gravity influences the solar system. Nothing in the asteroid belt is even aware of Tabaldak’s existence.

  Cardoza: So maybe Tabaldak’s bouncing rocks at us from farther out then. Not from the asteroid belt, but out by Pluto in the Kuiper Belt, or from the Oort Cloud.

  Dr. Shieling: That’s actually possible, but you’re missing the point. Asteroids take time to migrate into the inner solar system. There’s no way anything within Tabaldak’s gravitational influence has had time to reach us yet. Tabaldak is over ten thousand AU away, and it’s only been out there stirring things up for a few years. Even the light coming off it takes two months to reach us, and meteors don’t travel anywhere close to the speed of light. In the most fanciful of scenarios it’d take decades, but more like millennia or longer for us to see any effect.

  Cardoza: What if this isn’t Tabaldak’s first pass? I mean, what if it’s not really a rogue and it’s actually in a super-long-period orbit around the Sun, and the recent meteors are a result of the last time it made its closest approach?

  Dr. Shieling: We’ve got top people on that, too. Best we can tell, Tabaldak’s path is hyperbolic. This is a one-time deal. Period.

  Cardoza: So, explain what’s causing the spike in near-Earth objects then. Most weren’t even on our radar until recently, is that right?

  Dr. Shieling: Here’s some gospel you can spread, JC—experts don’t always have the answers, but that doesn’t mean you get to break physics to fill in the gaps.

  Cardoza: Amen, brother.

  Dr. Shieling: You know how many near-Earth objects we found five years ago, JC?

  Cardoza: Some.

  Dr. Shieling: Four-point-one per day.

  Cardoza: Sorry, what? That’s freaking terrifying.

  Dr. Shieling: And how many are we finding this year?

  Cardoza: More?

  Dr. Shieling: Four-point-three a day.

  Cardoza: I think it’s the hitting-Earth-objects more than the near-Earth ones that are getting people worried.

  Dr. Shieling: Have I taught you nothing?

  Cardoza: And we didn’t see these three recent ones coming at all, right?

  Dr. Shieling: The smaller they are, the higher the chance they’ll slip past us our defenses.

  Cardoza: So if they catch us by surprise, they’re probably too small to pose a threat.

  Dr. Shieling: Probably.

  Cardoza: Probably?

  Dr. Shieling: I really wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.

  Cardoza: Well, that’s all for our show. Sweet dreams, everyone.

  Dr. Shieling: Good night.

  4

  It’d been a hectic first day, but Taiyo wanted more. His boots stirred through the underbrush, and he took in the pungency of the jungle—odors from the drizzle, mud, and decaying wood.

  Something shook the tangle of foliage up ahead, just off the narrow trail.

  Ethan signaled for the line of candidates behind him to stop, but the creature fled before anyone could glimpse it.

  “A cassowary, I reckon,” Ethan said.

  Ronin yawned loudly.

/>   Taiyo loosened the waist strap of his backpack to ease the chafing caused by the midday humidity. Although a lot lighter and more compact than old-school diving tanks, the rebreather strapped to his pack added bulk.

  Ethan, as thrilled as a teen discovering internet porn, had pulled the whole team of T3 contractors from their bungalows to help hand out the gear.

  In all Taiyo’s years of diving, his imagination had never failed to substitute the sea for space. In fact, he’d taken up diving for that analogy, and to pad his resume. Space agencies looked for people who had experience with technical equipment, risk management, harsh environments, and working in teams.

  This particular rebreather, coming straight from the associated labs of the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, looked like a thin-shelled, full-cover motorcycle helmet with a pair of tubes coming out the back of the head and into a shoebox backpack. When not in use, the whole apparatus strapped nicely to the top or bottom of each candidates’ trekking pack.

  Taiyo marched up the line to catch up with Ethan. In his haste, he pushed aside a springy branch, and before he could snag the recoil, it whacked Nel in the face. She didn’t even flinch. Her only reaction was to nod at his apology. Over the sounds of the forest and nearby Bloomfield River, Taiyo tried to infuse some humor, saying to their Khaki-worshipping guide, “You know, I always thought cassowaries were mythical, like the Tasmanian tiger or aborigines.” He should’ve given poor Ethan a break, but Ethan was fun.

  “I mighta reckoned you’d at least Google the local biota before tramping it.” Ethan stopped and pointed to a mangled fern beneath Taiyo’s boot.

  “Shit, sorry. Didn’t see it.”

  The twitchy Aussie gently pushed aside a branch and stepped around a fallen branch.

  When Taiyo tried to look the cassowary up on his phone and failed to get a signal, Ethan happily supplied the missing info: “Picture knives for claws, a blue head with a crest of bone like a chopping axe, and hanging from its throat is the biggest, most gorgeous pink scrotum you’ll ever see.” He illustrated with his hands. “Lucky if ya spot one, ay. Mighty territorial. Mind you, the males are heaps more tolerant than the females.”

  “Not surprised,” Ronin said from behind Taiyo. He got no response.

  Taiyo heard a rustling in the leaves and slowed his stride just in time for a horned beetle to scurry off the path to safety.

  “How do you tell the males from the females?” Walter called to Ethan from the rear.

  Taiyo hadn’t thought of that question. But now that it was out there, he had to know.

  Not a trace of humor came out in Ethan’s voice, only glee. “Yeah, just like Homo sapiens, mate. The females have a vagina, and the males have a penis. Both sets of genitals grow hot and engorged when aroused. They’re toeier than a Roman sandal this time of year, yeah, so ya got a fair go at spotting a keen male doing his dance round the female, his throat trembling as he makes his boo sounds. That’s when you’ll see the female bend over and thrust her swollen vagina in the air and waggle it for him to bury the bishop. Absolutely gorgeous, mate.”

  Taiyo said, “I’m beginning to see why the trip is relevant to my future as an astronaut.”

  “Facken rights, mate.”

  They came to a creek. Ethan made sure they each inspected the banks and dark water, upstream and down, before leading them across single file over a bamboo bridge.

  “If ya need a lookie at the penis on a male,” Ethan continued without any prompting, “it’s the same technique as sexing a crocodile. But ya won’t find that in your Lonely Planet.”

  “I’ll pencil it into the margin,” said Anton between his struggles to spit something out of his mouth, probably a spider web, or possibly a spider.

  The din of insects and the unseen river made Ethan’s voice fade in and out as they moved along the overgrown trail, but Ethan wasn’t done. “Ya gotta get the animal on its back and insert a finger. Ya gotta explore and stimulate the animal’s cloaca to force the penis to extrude. Now, a common mistake is to …”

  Taiyo drifted toward the back of the troop to where Nel brought up the rear. Together, they tried to focus on brushing aside the onslaught of vines and branches, but they didn’t rein in the giggles until they reached the muddy bank of the broad, mocha-colored Bloomfield River.

  Moored at the muddy bank was a pale-blue, two-story pontoon boat—the same pontoon that had scared the piss out of Taiyo earlier that morning when he’d gone out on the mangrove headland.

  Up the ladder on the top deck, they meet an elderly aboriginal man hawking fishing poles. The man greeted them with a sun-cracked smile that beamed from a mane of hair. Henry, he called himself, though the accent made even that much hard to discern.

  “Bait,” said Henry, seeing Taiyo’s eyes drift to the hunks of red meat dangling from each bamboo pole Henry had leaning against the railing.

  The bait wasn’t for catching fish.

  The primal prowess of crocodiles had always fascinated Taiyo. An elementary school teacher had once told him the crocodile embodied the ideal Japanese student: still, silent, patient, keeping only its eyes above water as it observed the shore without making a ripple. The crocodile, said the teacher, had outlived the dinosaurs and endured the ages with little need to change. But the teacher was an idiot, a fact Taiyo had pointed out and been punished for. Crocodiles had stayed on top because they were nature’s most proficient killers. And their longevity was as an entire genus. Just as great nations and empires fell, so too had many species and subspecies of crocodylus, and almost always because they’d failed to diversify; failed to adapt.

  Taiyo happily handed Henry ten Aussie dollars for a baited pole, as did the other five candidates. Taiyo looked down over the railing onto half a dozen slowly circling crocodiles, none less than three meters long, some over five. Determined to get his money’s worth, Taiyo would wait to lower his bait until watching Ronin and Walter have a go. In each instance, the crocodile went from dormant to airborne with such speed and accuracy it seemed to defy physics. The sight thrilled all aboard the pontoon, but the combined twenty dollars had vanished within seconds.

  Now, Nel and Kristen watched Taiyo. He eased down his line, eyeing the closest crocodile and not the meat, keeping in mind how high he’d just seen them jump, and watching the hind legs and tail for the first sign of muscle-twitch. Then, when the croc leaped into the air, he flicked his wrist and stole the meat away, leaving it dangling out of reach. The empty jaws snapped shut midair, and the croc splashed back down into the water unfed. He did it again and again, reusing the same bait. Each time, he stared the monster down as it shot out of the water. The massive jaws and rows of dagger-like teeth were mesmerizing. The reptile could’ve swallowed him whole.

  The other AsCans hooted and laughed.

  Taiyo moved along the railing to target the same croc who’d just leaped. “It has to rest now,” he said.

  “Ay,” agreed Ethan. “Her batteries don’t last much.”

  Taiyo lowered the meat closer and closer to the half-submerged head of the beast and laid it right on top of the snout. The croc just lied there in the murky water like a log unable to respond.

  So predictable were the crocodiles, they never caught on to the teasing. They never adapted.

  Eventually, Ethan urged for mercy, and Taiyo dropped the hunk of meat down in front of the smallest croc, but a bigger croc snatched it away first. Afterward, Taiyo couldn’t help but think the poor crocs had spent magnitudes more calories trying to snag the meat than the meat could have provided.

  “Creatures of opportunity,” Ethan said. “Gorgeous.”

  “Fascinating,” said Taiyo.

  Taiyo could’ve gazed at the giant reptiles longer, but while the others bought more meat to try his technique and listened to Ethan explain how one might go about extracting the animals’ semen, Taiyo gave Henry an extra ten dollars, thanked him, and went and stood against the corner post, happy to observe.

  After Nel had a t
urn, she came over beside him and folded her forearms on the railing. She kept her eyes on the crocodiles below, as did he, but she tucked her hair behind her ear as if ready to listen if he had something to say.

  “You know,” Taiyo said without taking his eyes off the crocodiles, “my dad’s Canadian. From Vancouver.” What a stupid thing to stay.

  She only turned her head to him for a second, barely acknowledging he’d spoken.

  He wanted to tell her he wasn’t trying to hit on her, but that would be worse than saying nothing. He didn’t think he was attracted to her. Sure, she was cute, but that didn’t matter. He’d already crossed “relationship” off his bucket list. Twice. Lin, and then Jidenna. He had nothing bad to say about Jidenna, but she’d proven his hypothesis: not even a good relationship was worth the distraction and upkeep. There were only so many hours in a day, and only so many brain cells, and he preferred to use both for more rewarding pursuits, like designing spacecraft and building up skills and knowledge to improve his chances of becoming an astronaut.

  He spoke again, and made it worse: “But Dad moved to Japan before I was born.” He knew full well that a lifetime of being identified and defined solely by being hafu had polluted his social skills. But that wasn’t something to say out loud either. Word could get back to the evaluators.

  Of course, no matter how hard the candidates tried to fake perfection, three weeks under surveillance would unmask their faults. Still … No need to rush into it.

  Nel turned to face him. She spoke slowly and clearly, her husky voice a contrast to her innocuous features. “Most of my family is from Nunavut.” She didn’t smile, but he sensed no malice.

  “Nunavut, wow,” he said way too enthusiastically. “The Arctic.” If his knowledge of Canadian geography had impressed her, she didn’t show it. She went back to watching the crocodiles.

  He watched Nel watching the crocs and realized why she intrigued him. He knew now that she was Inuit, and not of Southeast Asian descent, as he’d presumed. He didn’t know how integrated or overrun her hometown was with broader influences, and he was surely romanticizing it in his head, but the Arctic climate alone meant she came from a lifestyle absent of so many of the conveniences he took for granted. In a territory almost as vast and untamed as the Moon or Mars, an intimacy with the land must have still resonated with people. She represented a part of the human experience he’d rarely considered. It made him think it was kind of dumb to stage a simulation in the jungle when there were perfectly good examples to learn from of isolated communities thriving in harsh environments right here on Earth.